Russia’s attacks on Ukraine and the emerging war in Europe have shocked many, and I’ve been thinking about why. To some extent, I think it’s about how we like to believe we’ve changed. That is, we want to believe people have moved beyond the petty conflicts and ambitions of the past and are better people, with better morals. Sure, yes, there was once a time when people would tolerate leaders like Hitler or Stalin who had goals of world conquest and would slaughter millions to achieve their ends – but not anymore, we tell ourselves. We’re different, and we would take a stand against evil and speak truth to power, we think. And, not only that, but diplomacy and negotiation will work to stop these types of aggressions – there’s no reason, we tell ourselves, that we shouldn’t be able to solve problems before they lead to war.

However, reality intervenes to reveal that the true nature of humanity hasn’t changed. C.S. Lewis addressed this in his book Mere Christianity, where he addressed our tendency to think people and morals have improved over time. In this view, we now have higher morals, better beliefs, and have improved – and so that’s why we don’t commit the horrible atrocities of the past. He writes:

One man said to me, “Three hundred years ago people in England were putting witches to death. Was that what you call the Rule of Human Nature or Right Conduct?” But surely the reason we do not execute witches is that we do not believe there are such things. If we did – if we really thought that there were people going about who had sold themselves to the devil and received supernatural powers from him in return and were using those powers to kill their neighbors or drive them mad or bring bad weather, surely we would all agree that if anyone deserved the death penalty, then these filthy quislings did. There is no difference of moral principle here: the difference is simply about matter of fact. It may be a great advance in knowledge not to believe in witches: there is no moral advance in not executing them when you do not think they are there.

In other words, it’s not that our morals have changed – it just that the facts (or our view of them) are different from what they were before. So we act differently, but not because we’re fundamentally any different.

In a way, I think our decades – or perhaps even half century – of relative peace have left us in a similar place. We tend to think that we’ve moved beyond global conflict and the scheming and machinations which led to the first and second World War. We’ve made moral advances, and are better people now, so such things wouldn’t happen again, we tell ourselves. Or, the types of concessions Chamberlain made to the Nazis in order to ensure peace – well, in today’s world, such concessions wouldn’t contribute to the imperial ambitions of a dictator, because we’ve moved beyond such things. We know better. We are better.

Unfortunately, that’s not true. There’s been no fundamental change to the nature of humankind. We stopped burning witches because we don’t believe in them, not because we’re better people, and we stopped having world wars not because we are beyond such things but because circumstances prevented them, at least for a time. And now, we unfortunately must receive a powerful reminder that human nature is still the same – still as much in need of redemption and transformation by a Savior as it has ever been.